The greatest enemy Destiny 2 has ever faced, the mighty beaver error, has finally been defeated.
Destiny 2 PC players have known only agony since Season of the Worthy when Bungie switched the game’s connection to use Valve’s servers. Since then, disconnection errors--called “beaver errors” in the language of Destiny 2--were rampant. At times, certain game modes were completely unplayable as matchmaking couldn’t actually fill a squad with enough players.
It got so bad that Destiny 2 players started calling Season of the Worthy “Season of the Beaver.”
Recently, however, the dreaded beaver has subsided. Something has finally appeased the great buck-toothed beast, and it seems Bungie has finally figured out what it was.
On July 16, Bungie reported that they’d tracked the beaver error to its den, although they couldn’t quite figure out how to slay the beast. Then, on July 23rd’s This Week At Bungie, the developer revealed the source of the issue:
"This past week Valve identified hardware configuration issues with 4 relays in their Chicago, Virginia, Stockholm, and Dubai data centers. In each case, the affected relay was unable to send traffic to one other relay in the same data center. If a connection to a peer went through both of those relays, then it would drop. Valve has fixed the configuration issues, and we have confirmed that the rate of disconnections in the affected areas has been reduced significantly."
If you want even more details, Valve engineer Fletcher Dunn posted a multi-part story on his Twitter account that details how he, in partnership with Bungie, finally managed to track down the source of the error.
What made the problem take literally months to solve was just how elusive it was. Beaver errors were random, unreproducible (as in, no specific action could cause a beaver error), and strangest of all, restarting the game would often cause those errors to go away.
Fletcher gets very technical in his explanation, but it boils down to how Valve uses software routing for its internet traffic and that software wasn’t reporting problems between hosts if they’re in the same data center.
Now that Valve and Bungie know what they’re looking for, they’ve been able to significantly reduce the number of disconnection errors on PC. Raids, Gambit, and Crucible are all back to playable levels, and you don’t have to worry about your flawless Trials run being interrupted by a dam-building rodent ever again. Hopefully.
Source: Bungie, Twitter, Reddit